Our journey- from 8 week old pup, to agility dog, school dog, and trickster. Training thoughts, tips and lots of problem solving, photography and general musings on owning a silly and serious paradoxical Aussie Shepherd.

Blogroll

priors

Meta

positives

I’m feeling a bit down in the dumps. Went to our club’s x-mas breakup thing today and wanted to play on the course they’d set up but of course… we couldn’t do the DW, the A-frame, the weaves, and she didn’t trust the see-saw the first time. In terms of the ‘tricky’ bits of the course with the jumps- FINE! No problem! She actually handled those bits perfectly, but it was just frustrating to not be able to do more. I know, it’ll come, I just want it now. Especially since she wouldn’t even get ON the dogwalk because it was high and scary. Is that going to happen a lot? I don’t know. Where do I find unfamiliar dogwalks to practise on? She wasn’t her normal running self this morning either- I don’t think she likes sunny days. Sigh. I’m hoping that when we start competing it gets even more fun and exciting for her and I’ll start to see what she can really do.

Mal on the other-hand is really weird these days. SUPER soft and unsure. Weaved like a mad thing but popped out at #10. Knew he would, told him he was really good anyway. Who cares? Maybe it’s his age, lack of training lately, I dunno, it was a bit sad, he just wasn’t his old self who would go and take jumps- he was relying on me so much. I’m sure he didn’t used to be like that.

But this post is meant to be about the positives, which would NOT include our RC training from this morning where I was literally starting her from 30cm above the contact on the down plank and trying to slowly work our way back. Any higher and she’ll leap. Do I drop the height? And back down to where? 800mm we weren’t getting a lot of separation… do I go back to 600 and raise in 10cm increments?? Or do I persevere, knowing it took about 5-6 sessions of lots of leaps and desperation on 800mm before we started getting hits. I don’t know. All ideas welcome. My brain hurts from trying not to stress over it, and then inevitably stressing over it. I’d just like one thing ‘done’. Like, yep we can weave – check that off the list. Nope. She can do a tunnel. check.

Positives! That’s what this post was meant to be about:

No incidences of chasing horses today! Yay! A bit of staring into ‘rabbit paddock’ but no running off. Good girl.

Did some ‘backside of the jump’ training today and she did really well! Hurrah!

She handled a semi-trial-like environment really well- did some tricks, played with her rope and focused beautifully when she was in with me. I suspect that idleness=carrying on, lunging on the lead, distraction… movement from me= great focus.

She did some really nice wraps in the little sequence and even did a good seesaw. Yay.

No weird jumps!!! At the x-mas thing, from what I saw of her jumping, they were all nice… none of them were huge and weird anyway. Yay!

As you’ll see in the video, she’s started playing tug really well. It’s really interesting because Denise Fenzi said that when it comes to toy play, a slight change in technique can bring huge differences… like, moving the dog in a figure-8, not expecting them to pull back all the time but just to maintain pressure on the tug, and to tug between your legs like I do in the video. She even played really nicely at the x-mas thing.

Anyway… trialling just seems a long, long way off. Though I reckon we’d do ok in a jumping course. 😉

Share this:

Like this:

Related

Post navigation

2 thoughts on “positives”

Oh I can so, so relate to the feelings of bitter when it comes to a trial situation. Penny has A LOT of fun runs in her future before we try for real

Congrats on the tugging success! The happiest I ever was with her was when she tugged in a ring, amid new people& dogs, for the first time ever. Such a good feeling when tugging isn’t naturally rewarding for the dog!!